As announced at the launch of Google Buzz, the Google Buzz API aligns itself with the ever-growing family of freely available and community-developed protocols, formats, and standards for sharing and consuming social content on the web, including ActivityStreams, Atom, AtomPub, JSON, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, MediaRSS, PortableContacts, and more.

The Google Buzz API, a member of the Google Code Labs, is very much a work in progress — we intend to continue to iterate out in the open as we go along — and we hope the features we are making available today will help inspire developers and provide a solid foundation for new applications to be built.

We are already excited to see developers who were helping us test the API deliver terrific applications. Today you'll start seeing the following sites and services integrate with Google Buzz:

End-users opt into using applications built with the Google Buzz API via an interstitial confirmation screen outlining the application's requested access scope (read-only, read/write, etc.). They can see which apps have access to their data and can disable access at any time from the Google Accounts page, the Google Dashboard, the “Buzz" tab in Gmail Settings, or from the app itself.

This initial iteration of the API includes support for fetching public per-user activity feeds, fetching authorized and authenticated per-user activity feeds (both what the user creates, and what they see), searching over public updates (by keyword, by author, and by location), posting new updates (including text, html, images, and more), posting comments, liking updates, retrieving and updating profiles and social graphs, and more. The best way to get started is to dive right in and begin reading the Google Buzz API developer documentation.

There’s a lot more to come, and we expect to keep moving quickly from here. But none of this would be possible without the hard work of everyone participating in creating the protocols upon which Google Buzz is built, so we ask and encourage developers to get involved with the communities behind ActivityStreams, OAuth, and the countless others that we depend on.

And as with any young API, there will undoubtedly be bugs and issues and places where we’ve deviated from what the specifications say, or with what developers may expect. When you see something amiss, get confused by an approach we’ve taken, or just want to comment on our progress, we invite you to update the Buzz API issue tracker and please join the conversation on the developer forum.

With that, we’d like to welcome everyone to the first version of the Google Buzz API. We can’t wait to see what else we can build together.